Having a social recruiting strategy (both for your company’s social pages and your own personal channels) is an opportunity to showcase your employer brand, highlight employees and bring attention to your company culture and values. It’s not about promoting jobs but getting the attention of passive talent to your company.
Focusing on passive talent is increasingly important because this group makes up 85% of the labor force who aren’t actively looking for a job and so not on job boards!
But creating an effective strategy for social media that’s not focused on just posting jobs can seem intimidating. What are you going to post? When are you going to have the time to create the content? How are you going to prove the effectiveness of this effort?
This is where employee generated content (EGC) can be both practical and powerful. While it still takes time and planning to execute successfully, it will provide you with an abundance of authentic content that shows potential candidates exactly who your company is without you having to collect stories or testimonials from employees and write each post.
At our recent RallyFwd Virtual Conference, Lisa Kay Davis, Associate Director of Global Social Media at Kyndryl, shared how she and her team reimagined employee generated content, bringing to life the best stories and backgrounds of Kyndryl’s employees across 34 countries using a strategic company-wide social campaign. This campaign proved to be a huge success, achieving multiple goals for the company.
To help you create an impactful and compelling employee generated content campaign as part of your social recruiting strategy, we’re going to dive into Lisa Kay’s story of this unique campaign, what made it so effective and her pro tips for implementing this strategy at your company.
Before we get into the campaign, let’s meet Lisa Kay Davis and Kyndrl.
Meet the Expert
Lisa Kay Davis, Associate Director, Global Social, Kyndryl
Lisa Kay Davis is Associate Director for Global Social at Kyndryl. She started her career at a recruiting agency with the responsibility for “web writing,” which meant writing the job reqs and attracting people to different opportunities for various recruiters at the firm. Since then, her work has resulted in award-winning content and social programs that have extended brand messaging and awareness globally across multiple digital and social platforms.
Kyndryl is a technology company that designs, builds and manages many of the mission-critical technology systems that the world depends on every day, with 4,600 global customers including 75% of the Fortune 100 companies around the world.
Kid to Kyndryl: Reimagining employee generated content
Kyndryl’s challenge was to create a sense of belonging among employees (and promote that to talent) having been spun off from a historic brand.
In 2020-2021, Kyndryl was established, having been spun off from another technology company with a known brand. Now being an independent company on its own, they faced the challenge of being unknown both to potential clients and the talent who they wanted to come work with them. Kyndryl needed to show who they were as people. They also needed to establish a sense of belonging and culture among their tens of thousands of employees spread out around the world (and in the middle of a pandemic). Combining these goals, Lisa Kay and the team saw an opportunity to use organic social media to connect employees (known as Kyndryls) together, publically tell their employee stories and utilize Kyndryls’ social networks to spread the message of who they are as individuals and a company as a whole. And from these goals, the Kid to Kyndryl campaign was born.
Rally Note: Kyndryl and their Kid to Kyndryl campaign won 2023 Rally Awards for Best Use of Employee Generated Content (First Place) and Best Content Marketing Program (Second Place).
The strategy was to showcase how each employee’s childhood curiosity manifests in their current roles at Kyndryl today by encouraging them to share this as a story on their personal social channel. This would bring the employees together under one shared identity and elevate the company’s reputation as having the most curious and diverse minds within the industry. Employees from every part of the company (no matter their role or function) were invited to share a Kid to Kyndryl story, illustrating the message of that initial spark during childhood that led all the way to Kyndryl and its technology.
With this concept in place, Lisa Kay and the team moved forward in creating and executing a plan. They decided that LinkedIn would be the platform for these stories because of its high credibility as a platform for work-related content. From there, the team established a framework for the campaign that was communicated to the employees. This framework included the tone and language that should be used in the employee’s posts, specifics for the types of images to share and the hashtag that would connect all the posts together on LinkedIn.
Lisa Kay shared, “I think orchestration throughout this event was really important because it made sure that the content our employees put out was uniform and professional.”
Employee generated content from across the world
When the Kid to Kyndryl campaign went live, hundreds of these stories were shared and consumed on LinkedIn. One detail that made this campaign so unique and effective was that LinkedIn is not necessarily a space where people see such personal content. So, it caught the attention of LinkedIn’s audience.
Examples of posts shared by Kyndryl employees as part of the Kid to Kyndryl campaign.
Lisa Kay remarked, “We’d hear from our people inside and outside the organization, including clients and partners, how much they enjoyed this content and couldn’t stop reading the stories.”
The posts shared by employees showed the many different geographies, ethnicities and languages that represent the diverse Kyndryl team. It showcased Kyndryls’ great depth and creativity as well as that a career in technology is not necessarily a linear path.
Lisa Kay shared, “I was excited to see that within our lineup, we had English, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese all represented under one hashtag. This is not something that just always happens, and I think you can’t plan for that. That’s just who we are and it surfaced so nicely through this campaign.”
Posts from the Kid to Kyndryl campaign were in English, Spanish, Japanese and Portuguese, showing the diversity of Kindryls.
The posts also represented all levels of employees at the company, including chiefs of staff and senior managers, all sharing parts of their childhood and how it contributed to the success that they’ve had throughout their careers, leading to their current role at Kyndryl.
Employee generated content measurement and results
Organic social campaigns may not take a lot of budget, but they can take a lot of time and effort in planning, coordinating and facilitating their success. Make sure you have a plan for measuring and reporting the results to your stakeholders and leadership. Start by defining your key performance indicators (KPIs).
From a social media standpoint and employee generated content standpoint, how many posts were created by employees? How many impressions did those posts get? How many clicks did the content get? And, what was the engagement rate on those posts?
Lisa Kay was thrilled to share that the Kid to Kyndryl campaign reached 400 posts in the first 10 days, receiving 583,842 impressions and 71,005 engagements! This was an increase of 490% of the average LinkedIn impressions that their content receives.
Beyond the social metrics, make sure you’re measuring the effect your campaign has on organic recruiting traffic to your careers site, how many new followers to your social channels, how many new people have been added to your talent community and how many candidates convert into applicants.
Rally Note: To easily measure the impact of your employee generated content campaign, sign up for a free account of our Recruitment Marketing & Analytics tool, Rally Inside. Upgrade to a paid plan to easily track how your social posts convert to completed applications. Learn more >
Employee generated content campaign pro tips
While coming up with an idea like Kid to Kyndryl can take a few hours of brainstorming, its success came from extensive planning from Lisa Kay and her colleagues, who’ve shared their pro tips for executing this type of strategy:
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Authentic employee generated content doesn’t just happen
When managers and stakeholders say that they want authentic content, know that this doesn’t just happen. You have to be mindful of who is in the community you’re asking to create the content, what is it they value and what do they consider worthy of sharing. Make sure you’re clear on the guidelines and expectations.
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Think through the mechanics of the campaign and posts
When a lot of people do something on social media, viewers take notice (think of all the social media challenges or trending hashtags). Make sure your hard work and planning actually has an impact by spending time to think through every piece and make sure the stories aren’t swallowed up in a black hole of forgotten content. That includes using consistent hashtags, eye-catching visuals that tell your story and raise curiosity, and the depth of sharing and engagement from your corporate channels and stakeholders.
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Start with your culture and values
When you’re beginning to brainstorm around an employee generated content campaign, start at the most basic level and do some research. Write out the values of your company and its community. What do you see your employees sharing on LinkedIn? What are they connecting to there? What do they “like”? What are they commenting on? Extract insights and observations from this exercise and let it inform your overall campaign and strategy. This will verify that what you’re asking of your employees is natural for them, ensuring your campaign’s success.
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Don’t forget to leverage all the great stories created
If your campaign is successful, you could amass lots of stories from your employees! Make sure you use them beyond social media. You can include the link to the hashtag in an email campaign, add the stories to your careers site, share them in a talent newsletter, and so much more! Overnight, you’ll have tons of content to help show what it’s like to work at your company, told by the people who work there.
A video created by Kyndryl and posted from their corporate LinkedIn account repurposing the photos that were shared by employees as part of the Kid to Kyndryl campaign to highlight the diverse, creative and curious employees that make up their company.
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With some creativity, thoughtful execution and a company filled with passionate employees, you can reimagine your employee generated content and create a social recruiting campaign that gets noticed for authentically sharing your company’s values and culture.
Thank you to Lisa Kay for sharing this campaign with us! To learn more about how Kyndryl reimagined employee generated content, watch the full session from the RallyFwd Virtual Conference, available on demand.
